We’ll use terms like “models” and “risks,” who’s really to care?
Just sell the damn carbon credits and give them a scare.

Because climates may change, as our eye relinquishes a tear.
We’ll fight the good fight, though the cost will be dear.

But what wouldn’t you bear for a future bucolic?
Where the winters are long and the youths do frolic…

Upon land that your fathers once called their own,
Where ghettos and barrios, the seeds are now sown.

Though never may welcome such hate unmaligned,
It’s the weather that matters, must we remind?

So petition and protest the sun’s bitter light.
And don’t cloud a thought…at the thought of your children’s plight.

We are reliably advised in the disintegrating West that change is good. It is to be embraced, never resisted. Those who demur are creatures even more base than consumers. They are Supremacists! Haters! Extremists! Xenophobes! Xylophones! And it is because we understand change to be such an unalloyed virtue, that we must defame and destroy the Change Deniers who would halt history’s climate progress. We must say to them, “the Earth is going to become warmer, and nothing you can do will stop it.” Those who cling to the past will be damned to live there. That is why anti-change Hate Speech as the following article must be banned: Global warming could spiral out of control.

Weather supremacists fearing change

Temperature diversity is a strength

If the world doesn’t cut pollution of heat-trapping gases, the already noticeable harms of global warming could spiral “out of control,” the head of a United Nations scientific panel warned Monday.

And he’s not alone. The Obama White House says it is taking this new report as a call for action, with Secretary of State John Kerry saying “the costs of inaction are catastrophic.”

Vote Democrat, demand climate change

One of the study’s authors, Maarten van Aalst, a top official at the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said, “If we don’t reduce greenhouse gases soon, risks will get out of hand. And the risks have already risen.”

More “risks” getting out of hand

Twenty-first century disasters such as killer heat waves in Europe, wildfires in the United States, droughts in Australia and deadly flooding in Mozambique, Thailand and Pakistan highlight how vulnerable humanity is to extreme weather, according to the report from the Nobel Prize-winning group of scientists. The dangers are going to worsen as the climate changes even more, the report’s authors said.

If humanity itself is vulnerable to this weather, then one can only wonder how many have already perished in these globally warmed heat waves, wildfires, and flooding. Perhaps dozens.

“We’re now in an era where climate change isn’t some kind of future hypothetical,” said the overall lead author of the report, Chris Field of the Carnegie Institution for Science in California. “We live in an area where impacts from climate change are already widespread and consequential.” Nobody is immune, Pachauri and other scientists said. “We’re all sitting ducks,”Princeton University professor Michael Oppenheimer, one of the main authors of the report, said in an interview.

After several days of late-night wrangling, more than 100 governments unanimously approved the scientist-written 49-page summary — which is aimed at world political leaders. The summary mentions the word “risk” an average of about 5 1/2 times per page.

“Changes are occurring rapidly and they are sort of building up that risk,” Field said.

Some of us have noticed.

“Things are worse than we had predicted” in 2007, when the group of scientists last issued this type of report, said report co-author Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development at the Independent University in Bangladesh. “We are going to see more and more impacts, faster and sooner than we had anticipated.”

More impacts. Faster and sooner.

The problems have gotten so bad that the panel had to add a new and dangerous level of risks. In 2007, the biggest risk level in one key summary graphic was “high” and colored blazing red. The latest report adds a new level, “very high,” and colors it deep purple.

You might as well call it a “horrible” risk level, said van Aalst: “The horrible is something quite likely, and we won’t be able to do anything about it.”

So horrible in fact that it precludes description. We won’t be able to do anything about it and we certainly can’t articulate what it might be. Just know this: Risk.

The report predicts that the highest level of risk would first hit plants and animals, both on land and the acidifying oceans.

The problems from global warming will hit everyone in some way, the magnitude of the harm won’t be equal, coming down harder on people who can least afford it, the report says. It will increase the gaps between the rich and poor, healthy and sick, young and old, and men and women, van Aalst said.

This unmentionable risk will start innocuously enough impacting only living things before insidiously attacking our vulnerable gases and rock. Nitrogen and blacks to be hardest hit.

But the report’s authors say this is not a modern day version of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Much of what they warn of are more nuanced troubles that grow by degrees and worsen other societal ills. The report also concedes that there are uncertainties in understanding and predicting future climate risks.

Nuanced troubles. I note that purple-coded “Horror” has become quite reserved in its dotage. And the report concedes uncertainties in predictions. But no uncertainty that nuanced global doom isn’t imminent, alas. Though I wonder just how uncertain are these uncertainties.

There is still time to adapt to some of the coming changes and reduce heat-trapping emissions, so it’s not all bad, said study co-author Patricia Romero-Lankao of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado.

“We have a closing window of opportunity,” she said. “We do have choices. We need to act now.”

Despite the ridicule, I’m agnostic on climate changer concerns. The farce of their philosophy lies in its insistence that a two degree temperature fluctuation represents a greater threat to our posterity than Kinshasa on the Thames. The majority would insist the latter is no “threat” whatsoever, bigot. Sitting ducks indeed.

Though if one is utterly determined to resurrect the European ice sheets, it is an engineering rather than a social problem that must be overcome. And as was linked previously in these pages, it is a problem with a known solution.

The simulations hint that global average surface temperatures would drop suddenly by about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius), their lowest levels in more than 1,000 years. In some places, temperatures would get significantly colder — most of North America, Asia, Europe and the Middle East would experience winters that are 4.5 to 10.8 degrees F (2.5 to 6 degrees C) colder, and summers 1.8 to 7.2 degrees F (1 to 4 degrees C) cooler.

Presumably this is the sought after result. Catastrophic cooling to negate catastrophic warming. Though I have seen no parties prescribing such an ameliorative response to our catastrophic predicament. And though natively naive, this peculiar omission makes me wonder just what principle is adrift upon the climate change ice floe. It’s a section of the North Atlantic we should be very judicious in navigating.

1)Navigating Triggering Events
2)White on White: Communicating about Race and White Privilege Using Critical Humility
3)Orientation to White Privilege and Strengthening Cross Racial Skills
4)”Y’all Gonna Make Me Lose My Mind!:” An Institute for People of Color
5)Our Bodies Know the Way: Using Cellular Wisdom to Dismatle Whitemess and Live in Deep Community
6)The Power of Polarities: Interrupting White Privilege and Building Sustainable Relationships
7)What’s a White Parent To Do: Talking White Privilege with our Kids, Understanding the Impact of Racism in Schools, and Advocating for Racial Justice
8)White Women: Internalized Sexism and White Superiority
9)Deepening our Relationships and Transforming Communities – Vulnerability and Shame as an Asset to Seeking Justice
10)Youth Action Project Institute for Middle School Students
11)Youth Action Project Institute for High School Students
12) Climate-Change-Mind-Set: Replacing White Liberalism with Racial Justice As Our Communities Organize in Response to Climate Change
13) Resisting the Internalized Trickster: No Limits to What We Can Do!
14) A Critical Dialogue – Poverty, Race and Education: What does this mean for Education Degree Programs in Institutions of Higher Learning?
15) Where are all the White People? Strategies for engaging white people in racial justice
16) Practical Solutions of How the Social Justice Activist & the Institution can develop Collaboration to Dismantle White Privilege

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One thought on “Climate Change Bad, Demographic Change…Very Good”

If memory serves, the average temperature of the planet since life began is 24c. Today, we are at about 14c.

We have some way to go.

If memory serves, the mean IQ of Haiti when it was the Spanish island called Hispaniola was 100, and was considered a paradise. Today, Haiti’s mean IQ levels are about 63.

If memory serves, the mean IQ of “The West” when it was populated by Caucasians, was 100, and was considered a paradise, to the extent that global warming permitted in our semi-frozen landscape. Today, “Caucasia’s” IQ levels I suspect are around at about 90.